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20,000 Pottery Vessels, and Counting

April 11, 2016

Treasures of Clay

By Margaret Regan

From the University of Arizona Alumnus Magazine Spring 2007

When Nancy Odegaard was recruited away from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology more than 20 years ago, she was dazzled by the pottery collection she found at the Arizona State Museum.

“It’s the most complete Southwest collection anywhere,” says Odegaard, conservator and professor, standing in the museum’s new state-of-the-art restoration lab. “There are 20,000 vessels in the collection, representing 2000 years of pottery-making in the Southwest.”

The anthropology museum’s treasure trove of ceramic pots represents nearly all the Native cultures in the Southwest, including Arizona and New Mexico, as well as northern Mexico. Their names alone tell a tale of regional history: Anasazi, Hopi, Mogollon, Mimbres, Casas Grandes. Made by Native Americans from the clay they found in these desert regions, the pots help anthropologists understand their makers, their level of technology, their social groupings, their trade patterns.

But they’re also gorgeous works of art. The “early formative” people of 2000 years ago made mud-brown bowls in simple, satisfying shapes. The Mimbres followed a thousand years later with exquisite black-and-white designs, teased into sophisticated geometries and stylized bats and coatimundis.) And today, the Tohono O’odham of southern Arizona craft cheerful “friendship pots”—in which human figures reach their arms toward one another along the rim.

These ceramics are fragile, though, and when she arrived, Odegaard was dismayed by the poor conditions under which they were stored.

“These are old buildings,” Odegaard says of the museum’s two brick structures, located in the UA historic district near Old Main. “They were state-of-the-art at one time.

But much of the pottery could not withstand the lack of adequate climate control. It was too dry in the winter, and too wet during the summer monsoons, when the humidity can hit 70 percent. That causes the salt in the clay to come to the surface—just like the pots on your patio.”

White salts that mar garden pots are a minor annoyance, but when they form on priceless antique pottery, they can wreak catastrophe. The salt “begins to knock off the beautiful design.”

Trained as a conservator in a joint program at George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution (she later earned a doctorate from the University of Canberra in Australia), Odegaard set out to stabilize the pots as best she could.

“When I was first on board, I studied the pottery. I’d determine the problem in a pot, and figure out how and why it was happening. We made remedial improvements. For nearly 15 years, I’d say, ‘Here’s another box of Band-Aids.’ But we exhausted all the little fixes. We had a sense of urgency about what was happening to the collection.”

No more.

She and her staff—three full-time conservators, two part-time chemist volunteers, and a changing roster of 8 to 10 student interns—also have a new home. They now have the luxury of working on the pots—and other museum holdings, such as rugs and jewelry—in a lab that’s similarly state-of-the-art. At 2200 square feet, it’s a big step up from their tiny old workroom.

“This is so dramatic for us,” Odegaard says. “I used to have just one cramped space.”

Every last one of the 20,000 pots has now moved into a brand-new, 3200-square-foot up-to-the-minute vault. Carved into existing space on the first floor of the south museum building, the secure vault has precisely calibrated temperature and humidity controls. Acres of storage shelves, dusted with powder, give every pot the chance to stand on its own, no stacking allowed, and the lighting is soft and protective.

“It’s just for the Southwest pottery,” Odegaard gleefully notes, before rolling off every superlative in the conservator’s book: “It’s a wonderful, state-of-the-art climate-controlled, topnotch facility.”

The new lab is equipped with every gadget in the conservators’ tool bag. At the low-tech end is a sand table—kind of a sandbox on stilts—where workers glue shards back into pots above a cushioning layer of sand. At the far reaches of high tech is a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscope, hooked up to a computer, which “allows us to learn the composition and molecular structure” of a pot fragment.

Still to come, next winter, is a 1000-square foot public exhibition space. Adjoining both lab and vault, the gallery will have interior windows offering visitors an up-close opportunity to watch the conservation professionals and students at work. A plasma screen monitor will call up any pot in the collectionat the push of a button, and turn it around 360 degrees in virtual space, to show off its beauty in the round.

As a preview, a ceiling-high glass case is already exhibiting 120 of the museum’s most sterling pots, from the very earliest pieces to contemporary work by living Native artists.

Chris White, project coordinator, arranges the showcase wall of the Pottery Project Interpretive Gallery. These pots are some of the finest examples in a 20,000 pot collection that represents 2,000 years of pottery-making in the Southwest and Northern Mexico.

“It was a Herculean effort to get this funded over the last eight years,” Odegaard says. The museum managed to raise some $2.5 million, enlisting the help not only of the Gila River, Salt River, Pima Maricopa and Akchin Indian communities, but also from the feds and from private donors, including Agnese N. Haury, widow of legendary UA anthropologist Emil Haury.

At the tail end of the Clinton Administration, the collection was designated an “official project” of Save America's Treasures, a millennium preservation program spearheaded by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. Odegaard even got to go to a reception at the White House.

“It was really fun,” she remembers with a laugh. But more importantly, “We were the only collection in the state of Arizona to become an official project.” (The other Arizona designees, including the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, are buildings.)

The Treasures designation helped trigger some federal cash through a separate grant. Not to be outdone, last year Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano visited the museum, and declared the entire Southwest Whole Vessel Pottery Collection an “Arizona Treasure.”

Odegaard is naturally delighted by the new facilities (“it’s a win-win for the museum”) but perhaps even more important is the hard work yet to come in the lab.

“We’re going through every one of the 20,000 pots in the collection,” she says. “Every one will be assessed. The treatment of the pottery is not done yet. We’ll work on that for several years.”

The museum is the official state repository for archaeological materials dug up on Arizona’s public lands, so new pieces come in continuously. And conversely, in accordance with the law, the museum is repatriating numerous artifacts back to the Indian communities they came from. Even though the collection is partly in flux, every piece will be thoroughly documented and evaluated, and repaired when possible.

“We always do photo-documentation of any change and write it up,” Odegaard says. And the condition of the pots varies widely.

“Three-quarters of the material (in the collection) is old, from archaeological digs, and spent hundreds of years underground.”

The museum is now 110 years old, and when earlier workers restored pots, their practices were not necessarily up to current professional standards. Sometimes the provenance is not documented, and sometimes their cure for a cracked pot was worse than the original break. The remedy is not always immediately apparent. Sometimes the conservators must play detective, using the equipment to learn, say, the chemical composition of an old adhesive, or to detect the presence of glue.

On this particular day, a prehistoric Mogollon pot is getting its moment on the sand work table. Odegaard picks it up. It’s a fine polychrome specimen, with designs in black and white and red, but someone filled in its cracks with a plastic that would never be used today.

“This is unsightly,” Odegaard says. “Should we remove it?”

Another item, a cracked brown “corrugated” pot, so-called for ridges resembling corrugated cardboard, was once shattered into dozens of pieces. Some unknown worker in the past carefully reunited the shards into a pot, piecing it together like a jigsaw puzzle.

“It was well put together,” Odegaard decrees, “but poorly glued.”

Still another, full of holes, is held together by dozens of small sticks. An old adhesive is yellowing, dried, and no longer functioning. Odegaard says the plan is to remove the old glue. The pot will be placed in an airtight glass vessel with solvent inside and a lid on top. Chemical vapors will rise up and dissolve the adhesive, while the lid will prevent the noxious vapors from escaping into the lab.

But the piece’s future is in doubt. While it may have started its life centuries ago as a functional pot, it may no longer “be a pot,” Odegaard says, by the museum’s standards. Broken and deteriorated, it may end up in a labeled bag, a collection of pieces stored and available for study, and become a “teaching tool.”

In fact, if the Pottery Project aims to teach Arizonans of all stripes about their rich ceramic heritage, it more immediately teaches legions of UA students skills in conservation and archaeology.

“I’m really proud of the students. They’re all over the world now. And students come from abroad to do internships here.”

One recent Navajo undergrad, Jae Anderson, a math major, assessed the condition of materials that were to be returned to tribes. Some had been doused with pesticides, particularly fibers and feathers, and the student determined their level of contamination.

“Jae did a whole summer project, and helped us do calibrations of arsenic, mercury, and lead. He’s now working at the Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian for a year before going to graduate school.”

Caitlin O’Grady, a post-grad Kress Fellow, is assembling an exhibition on regional migration that may go into the museum’s proposed new venue at the Rio Nuevo site in downtown Tucson. She came out to do an internship with Odegaard while she was working toward a master’s degree in art and conservation at NYU, and decided to stay.

“The lab is very exciting,” O’Grady says. “There’s an opportunity for interdisciplinary work.”

And Odegaard’s enthusiasm is so infectious it energizes everyone anywhere near the Pottery Project.

Sonya Issaeva, a Russian native who has a degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, is the lab’s secretary/administrative assistant. She hopes to become a conservator of library materials.

“I was here two years before I ventured into gluing the pots,” she says. But now she’s confident as she bends over the pieces of an ancestral Hopi cooking pot from 1200 A.D. “Whenever the phones don’t ring, I work on the pots.”

Tularosa Black-on-white jar is pieced together in the first step of the conservation process.